 Okay, folks, 2.30 has passed, so we should actually talk about e-texts for a bit. And on a light-hearted note, it was only one of my goals in putting together this panel, that it was going to be Accent-a-Palooza, and you'll understand what I'm talking about in a little while. E-texts. Like so many panels that I sort of get an idea for, it started in orneriness, but it has moved from orneriness to something else since then. My name, by the way, is Glenda Morgan. I'm from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I direct academic technologies. And I saw recently a call for proposals and a call for participation in a library publishing conference in Kansas City. And it turns out that my worst fears were not realized, but in the call there was a lot of talk about scholarly publishing in the library as a thing that was growing in speed and momentum and things like that, but not much conversation about textbook publishing, so the more teaching and learning kind of things. And I thought, damn, we really should be talking about this because a lot of places are doing it. We're doing it at Illinois, not in the library. We're doing it in IT. I knew that UCLA had an initiative underway. I knew that Purdue had an initiative underway. SUNY has a giant textbook project that they're doing, the University of Oregon, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. So there's a growing sense out there that we're getting into the textbook publishing business either in IT or more commonly in libraries. And we really need to talk about it as a movement, and it is really a sort of interesting movement, I think, both in terms of the need for it, in terms of the growing costs of textbooks, but also what it sort of means, the larger implications of that. So we've pulled together a bunch of people to talk about e-textbook initiatives at their institutions. We've got Milind Basole from the University of Illinois. Todd. Grapone. Grapone, yeah. I didn't want to do terrible things to the pronunciation here from UCLA and Pat Reid from Purdue University. Just to sort of, and sort of through exploring those different things, we can get a sense of what some of the issues are and what some of the challenges are. So I'm going to stop yakking and hand it immediately over to Pat Reid who's going to kick off. All right, so I thought I'd start off by talking about some of the different struggles that we've had at Purdue. I've been at Purdue for two and a half, three years now, and we have in that time taken a look at course load, course smart, vital source, about half a dozen other different third party platforms for providing e-texts. We've also got, I cannot tell you how many different building blocks in Blackboard for publishers who actually go to our faculty members and convince our faculty members that'll only take half an hour for us to install a building block for them so that they can then have an e-text build in. And this has been very frustrating. But about six months ago, we decided that we would take a look at this from a completely different angle. So instead of taking a look at third party platforms, we decided we're going to put that on hold. And one of the main reasons is that there is some suspicion that the State of Illinois, no, Indiana, I'm with Purdue and we're in Indiana. It's really close to the border though. It's just a matter of time till we invade and take them over. And wouldn't you rather be in Illinois rather than Indiana? So there's some talk that the State of Indiana is going to pass a requirement that all of the public universities will use the same third party platform and that they will dictate what that is and when. So we decided let's skip that because that is just a major struggle anyway. Purdue does not own its bookstores. We do not contract with our bookstores and we are not in competition with our bookstores. So that is one of the things that has made it even more of a struggle when we take a look at e-texts. Despite that we've decided we're going to be in competition with our community in this one area. And so we decided that we would identify a completely different purpose. We are now looking at e-texts in two different lights. One is as open educational resources and the other is as a method for faculty to publish books at either an extremely low cost to their students or books that are not really books, things that are far more innovative and therefore the current publishers cannot meet their requirements. And so those are some of the reasons that we decided to go into two different initiatives. The first one that I'd like to talk about is the open... Oh we're remote, look at that, thank you. Make it much easier. This is our open education resources initiative. And raise your hand if you do not know what OERs are. Okay just a couple of you. Open educational resources are textbooks and other media that are available online absolutely copyright free or shared so that anybody can use them. The idea is that one faculty member at one institute might create a chemistry textbook, put it online and make it so that another professor at another university can use that, make changes to it. The only caveat is that whatever changes are made must also be available to everybody without any cost. And so we decided that this for our large enrollment courses might actually be a very effective way of cutting costs to students. And so what we are looking at here is adopting and reducing our textbook costs by eliminating a textbook for a high enrollment freshman course. And at Purdue when I talk about high enrollment we're talking about 1,600 to 2,000 students per year. So if we can cut a textbook that is $150 for that many students that's higher math than I can do. So how do I forward it? Oh no. Point it at it. Oh point it at it. At the laptop. Alright we'll just go everywhere and do this. Pat works in IT. I am technology challenged. I can't work my remote for my TV either. So as I said our target courses for this are high enrollment courses and we're looking for courses that don't have an electronic component because right now a lot of the publishers are sort of packaging textbooks with another online piece of homework or something that sort of ties it together, makes it very useful for the instructor but actually makes it significantly more difficult to replace that online component later on with OER materials. And we also are looking for a common textbook across all of the sections of a course. So if we've got a course that's got 1,600 students that means we might have for English, our open entry English course we might have 100 different sections and that means we have got 100 different instructors possibly and who is it that has made it that determination of what textbook or textbooks they will use. Very frequently each instructor selects their own textbook. When we do have some courses like our Econ 250 where there's one textbook, they have no web access component and so this would be a likely candidate for this kind of a project. We also need volunteer faculty. I don't know about your areas but that can be a challenge. That actually may be the biggest challenge of all of them. So is this my con? Oh it is, so I could just stand here. So what we are going to provide to the faculty who go into the OER initiative for us we will provide them with some, we will work with them to identify what are the objectives that they want for their textbooks. Then we have hired a company who will go out and search for OER materials that will meet those objectives so that the faculty member is not actually having to do that research. We will present those to the faculty member. The faculty member then can determine which pieces are going to be of the quality and the progression that they are looking for and then we can meld those together into a new OER or hopefully just add some multimedia, add some questions to make some interaction in it and then create something that the faculty member can then adopt. One of the other things we will provide that seems to be missing in a lot of the e-text initiatives is we will provide support to both the faculty and the students in how to actually use an e-text. And when you consider that for years and years people have been trying to teach students how to read a regular textbook. Adding an e-text on top of it can actually make it more difficult for them. We're hoping that we'll be able to actually combine those so that we will be able to teach the students how to read a textbook that happens to be online, how to use the highlighting features and how to actually read those chapter headings so that the chapter headings will help guide them. And there is also a potential for incentives for the faculty member. We're not guaranteeing this but some faculty members have just said if you've got a course that's got 1,600 students in it, you might be busy. And so we're going to try and help them by providing some incentives for summer work or other things like that. The other project we've got going on is called the e-text pilot and this is similar to but different from the OER pilot. Here we are actually encouraging faculty to develop their own materials and this could be their own materials as in a regular textbook. Some faculty members have got textbooks that the publishers have given them back the copyrights privileges for. So for example, some of our faculty teach high level courses that only have 30 students a year and the publishers are not interested in those kinds of books. They just do not earn enough money on those. And so rather than hold on to the copyright, they've given those back to the instructors and we're helping some of them put those online instead. We also are looking at some initiatives that are a little more innovative. We have got one faculty member who is last semester and the semester before he gave extra credit points to his students if they could send him a link to a website that had examples or information about what they were studying in organic chemistry that week. And now what he wants to do is compile all of those, eliminate the textbook and use completely online materials instead. So it's nothing that is original to him and he's not going to be copywriting it or anything like that but it's a unique way of getting his students involved as well as providing his students with a significantly less expensive. His textbook was $275 for organic chemistry. So on this e-text pilot, one of the purposes is that the students either pay a minimal fee or no fee at all depending on the faculty member. The targets here are faculty that want to try something different or are interested in replacing their current textbook or just developing something on their own. And in this, we've actually teamed up with the Purdue Libraries. I'm in the information technology area and we have teamed up with our libraries area. So the university press people have some expertise in copy editing and project management of textbook development and so they are providing that expertise. My CIO, Jerry McCartney, is providing some, a small amount of incentive funding to the faculty and together we're supporting the faculty and development. So some of the issues that we have faced with this are getting faculty buy-in. If we've got a faculty member, I've had several faculty members tell me that they've written their own book and they earn more on their book than they do in their annual salary. So why on earth would they want to move into something that was less expensive? And so for those faculty, obviously this is not, neither of these are a good solution. For many other faculty, however, we do have faculty who have written their own materials and just want to provide them at a lower cost, not just to Purdue students but also to other universities. Time is a little bit of an issue. Finding time to meet with all of the faculty and discuss their requirements. Sustainability, once they've actually developed the materials, how do we make it so that it stays current? How do we make it so that the faculty understand the purpose of having additions of books? How do we make it so that if we are incentivizing the faculty to develop a new item in the first place what is it that we can do to incentivize them to keep that book current and also create, how do we get faculty to create additional books? In the state of Indiana, we do not believe that we are allowed to make a profit. So if we provide an incentive to faculty to create a textbook can we at least do it back enough so that next year we can provide that same incentive to additional faculty? So we've got to really study that in detail. Again, time is a little bit of an issue working with faculty on project management. Platform selection and contracting. We have spent, I cannot tell you, how many hours working with different contractors, different platforms. We've spoken with Illinois at great length. We've got a platform that was built at Purdue and is now external to Purdue that we have a vested interest in working with. So we're still working on that piece of it. And the time spent on that has been pretty significant. And then lastly, all of our faculty have got individualized needs. What Paul Wenthold wants is not at all the same thing that Jamie Narn wants and what she wants is not the same as what Melanie Morgan wants. And all of these we have to work with individually, work with the libraries to find the best combination of IT staff and library staff and perhaps people in our Centre for Instructional Excellence to work with them. And all of that again takes time. So that is all that I need to say. Here I am. Please do feel free to give me a call, email me if you would like to speak with me, find out more about either of the initiatives that we're working on. Would you like to try using this? I'll just use this, thanks. I'm sure it's fine. Good afternoon. So I want to talk a little bit about the UCLA project. We're calling it the Affordable Course Materials Initiative. It was, we had noticed a few universities doing some open textbook projects that, for example, UMass, Temple, and MIT. Our project, similar to PATS, we wanted to have kind of a broader program to focus more on OER rather than textbooks. And we organized really around four principles. We wanted to lower the cost to the students, build open educational resources, integrate our collections used with licensed content and content created by faculty. We wanted to do some outreach to faculty as well. And so those are the four guiding principles. Our program itself was sponsored by our executive vice chancellor for research, the libraries, and the California Digital Library. And we didn't do a journal-subvention program. We wanted to do something a little bit broader. We saw new material coming from our faculty, and we wanted to kind of find a way to integrate that. This project was launched last quarter. And so here's the first quarter by the numbers. The pilot program incentivizes instructors to use low cost or free alternatives to expensive course material. These include open access scholarly resources, library licensed and owned resources, and learning objects and texts that faculty create themselves. We provided awards of $1,000 each for instructors teaching courses with enrollment with fewer than 200 students and awards of $2,500 each for instructors teaching courses with an enrollment of greater than 200. These are modest yet significant sums that are really meant to offer an incentive for the faculty to take the time to identify new resources, adjust their syllabus, and modify assignments. And they can also be used to cover actual expenses incurred by the instructor. Collection Development Awards may also be provided to build or enhance library collections in support of specific courses. Since our program launched on the pilot last March, we've received 27 applications. We've made 23 awards, 19 of which were money, three collection development assistants that entailed acquiring or licensing items for the library because they're needed for the course, and one award for expertise in helping to sort out copyright issues for an open access textbook. The total award, the total amount awarded doesn't reflect other expenditures in the library or other resources from the collections budget, for example, we might have put towards the program. As I mentioned before, we wanted a pretty broad program, and so applications have come from instructors in many different departments across campus. English Nursing Law and Chinese had multiple awards. A journal Subvention Program, we feel would have looked a lot different. We wanted a broad campus scope, and Subvention Programs have more uptake from science, and we really wanted a broader campus appeal. We felt that that was going to be more impactful than an open textbook program, which we felt on our campus we could only do a few of those. We wanted something bigger, and our OVCR, one of our sponsors, didn't really want to do a journal Subvention Program. He wanted us to do something a little different as well, and in order to get his support was pretty important to us. We also wanted to develop a program that offered faculty members alternatives to journals and textbooks as part of their course materials. We had a lot of faculty members using data in their courses, for example, and this was one way we could help them create material for courses. So we've only received complete figures from the courses taught last fall. So here are three of the ones that saved the students the most money. The numbers represent total savings to a theater course, a mechanical engineering course, and an economics course taught last quarter. They're calculated by figuring the cost of the materials used the last time the course was taught and the cost during the ACMI awarded quarter. For example, the last time the engineering course was taught, students had to buy a $200 textbook. During the ACMI quarter, the instructor created a quote-unquote textbook from his lecture notes. A project he had been meeting to do for quite a while, which he provided to the students at note costs. So 56 students times $200 equals $1,120 for one of our courses. So we don't really, aside from the numbers, what we have is some qualitative information, a couple of quotes from our faculty members. They really liked our approach. It's a team-based approach. Our team is a subject matter expert, someone who's an IP or copyright expert, a technologist and a metadata person. These are some of the resources we provide in a team So we also, at UCLA, have a pretty robust data and film school, as you might have guessed. And one of the reasons we focused on outreach is we'd seen a couple of our faculty members in the theater and performing arts creating multimedia applications, multimedia apps for specific courses. And we didn't necessarily think they made informed choices when they chose a platform to develop on, and we wanted to get there a little earlier. Just these two courses, these two apps you see, the one on the right is what's called Clip Notes. It's taught by one of our faculty members, used by one of our faculty members in his course about filmmaking. You play a movie and it calls out particular aspects of the film to draw your attention. For example, if you're interested in a jump cut learning what that is, how it's incorporated in the movie. It'll go to that section of the movie and show you that particular piece. The other title there is for one of our acting faculty members he teaches the undergraduates. It's called Stanislavski at the Movies and it talks about acting in a particular fashion. It'll bring clips of a movie into a text and show you exactly how illustrative examples of what he's teaching in the class. Good afternoon. My name is Milin Besoli. I'm with the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. I'm going to talk a little bit about our e-text initiative here at Illinois and basically go through a bit of the genesis of the project and what we have achieved, what we are yet to overcome, and what are our goals. I'm going to try and be brief so that we can actually spend a fair bit of time on Q&A and actually have a discussion rather than a presentation here. So e-text at Illinois and I was listening to Pat and Todd and we very much have similar goals. It was essentially conceived to be a reader platform for homegrown and published content and the few goals that we had were basically we wanted to reduce the cost burden on students. We want to make sure that, because there's all this hot blue about how much money people spend and how they're going broke, we want to make sure that at least at Illinois that isn't the case. We want to do somehow eventually make it revenue neutral, as in it be a self-sustaining kind of a system. I liked Todd, so it's not just about money, it's about other things as well. One of the other important aspects, or probably the important aspects that separates us from our competition, if you will, is we are universally accessible and by that I mean that you can access e-text at Illinois with any device that has an HTML compliant browser, which basically means any modern device which is in existence now. It's not only your laptop, your desktop computers, your tablets, your smartphones, but also devices for the mobility impaired folks or for visually impaired folks. We at Illinois, we actually take accessibility at a very, very, very seriously. We like to say that it's in our DNA because we are one of the first institutions to actually install curbs which are handicap accessible and bus ramps and so on and so forth. So we are at the forefront of the accessibility movement and we want to make sure that we sustain our threshold, if you will. And again, the nice part of accessibility is that once we make stuff accessible, it also becomes universally available. So it is, like I said, it is on any device you would like and because we can do published material, we have contracts with two publishers right now looking at more, but the idea is that any published textbook can be also made available on a text at Illinois platform and also any internet connected device and lastly, this is something we wish to go as we want to include OERs as well as eReserves and scholarly works in our edX platform as well. So we've been in production since about fall of 2010. We have about 2,000 students use it every semester. We have several 101 kind of classes on our platform because it's a very conducive environment for people who have multimedia needs. A lot of our classes are actually using eText as a platform for flipped classrooms because they can produce video which is then included in the book and the book becomes this main sort of a reference point for the students, especially for flipped classrooms. They go watch the videos before they come to class and then they will then go into a classroom or a lab and then expect to have a much more interactive aspect rather than the teaching. The teaching is already done with the video and the students are expected to have read the book and watch the video before they come to class. And again, like I said, it's homegrown and published textbooks so we have quite a few books that are already in our platform available to Illinois students and are increasing with a pretty rapid clip. We are throwing this platform to all our CIC colleagues. That's Big Ten plus University of Chicago and they can use our services, software as a service kind of a model like Pat was talking about a few minutes ago. They can or they will be able to use our platform and deliver our educational content to their students using our platform. So what are a few of our challenges faced? Again, we are a very small team so our growth has been deliberate. We have not literally thrown the floodgates open. We are trying to create as much impact as we can so we are targeting these Gen Ed type of classes, again 101 kind of classes because those are the ones that like Pat and Todd were saying have most impact on how much we can affect not only the cost but how we can actually use that to enhance teaching and learning, to enhance teaching and learning. There are some reluctance from publishers from using our platform because each one of them have their own platform. They are also well sort of in... Crossway would be in bed with Amazon and with course load and course smart so it's a bit of a model change for them to now use an HTML5 accessible compliant platform which is at eText at Illinois and they don't... Routinely it's like well we cannot do this because then you are giving them access to our content. Yes, we are giving them access to your content but it's behind... We are doing the DRM on our end. That takes a bit of convincing. So it's a bit of reluctance but we have two publishers, John Wiley and Pearson who are collaborating with us on delivering their content using our platform. Another one is integration with LMSs. We use primarily Blackboard at Illinois and we have had some issues in making our content and Blackboard talk to each other and again that's something that was a bit of reluctance from Blackboard that the interactions that we are seeking it's not something they are familiar with so it's more of a R&D approach there but it's something that we are again actively pursuing. Also, eText is an online platform right now. The next step we will be taking will be make it offline so student could potentially go offline and still read and interact with our platform. The last aspect is making accessibility a priority. Very early on when we were designing this platform we made sure that anything that isn't accessible will not go on our platform. We were trying very hard to stick to that and ensure that we are one of the more accessible platforms. We have been commended by the National Federation of the Blind and other various institutions because of our commitment to accessibility but regardless accessibility is a moving target because often changes in operating systems, changes in browsers or any other variables can make what was accessible a few days ago not so accessible anymore. So we have to continually be on a lookout to make sure that we are supporting the latest and greatest browser versions and operating system versions and that's again it's a bit of a challenge because it's again that's a priority for us but it still takes a little bit of time. Moving forward we want to integrate eText with eReserves. Right now we don't have it's basically a homegrown, anything that is homegrown and written at Illinois is available on our platform. Also some of the published books but we don't have an integration with eReserves so we want to ensure that is going forward that would be something that we will create. Ingestion, everything we do is HTML5 so the content that's available to us is not necessarily in HTML, not necessarily in HTML5 so it's a bit of a process and each of our books that came to us has come through a different route so we want to streamline some of that and possibly the contracts with our engagement with the publishers is going to streamline because it's not a... Each publisher has a different XML format for how they want to deliver their books. They are happy to give us PDFs but PDFs don't fly because they're not as accessible as HTML5. The last again is offline access that's essentially to enhance the usability. These days it's becoming slightly less relevant because students have smartphones and they are always on so if they can be on Facebook they could really be reading eText on bus. So we are... But regardless we do want to make sure that eText will provide them offline access. So that is a very, very short and brief what eText is about and we like to say at Illinois that eText is the future of the textbook, textbook of the future and that's the end of my formal presentation. I really want to encourage you to ask questions and possibly engage in a panel discussion that will help us all grow here.